The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem review – a retrofuturistic ride
You could trace an interesting history of recent western culture through its dystopias. From Zamyatin’s We to Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, it started with a mistrust of political systems. Then, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud came On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker. The looming environmental crisis brought us The Drowned World, The Road and The Year of the Flood. Now a sudden rush of books explore our complex relationship with technology – Don DeLillo’s The Silence, Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind and here, Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest. All of these dystopian visions of the near future – published within a few months of one another – imagine what would happen if the computers, telephones and networks on which we depend suddenly stopped working.
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The “arrest” of Lethem’s book is passed over breezily – it’s not quite clear why things stop working, nor why the problems with technology segue into a generalised breakdown of society. “Without warning except every warning possible it had come: the Arrest. The collapse and partition and relocalisation of everything, the familiar world, the world Journeyman had known his whole life.” Our hero is Journeyman, once known as Alexander Duplessis, who lives with his sister, Maddy, on a New England farm – “a pin stuck through a tattered portion of reality when all the rest of it flew away”. Journeyman and Maddy live a hardscrabble existence of farming and bartering, a long way from the Hollywood screenwriting career that Journeyman left when the phones (literally) stopped ringing.
Into this unforgiving world comes a figure from Journeyman’s past – the charismatic Peter Todbaum, who was working with Journeyman on Yet Another World, a dystopian TV series. He arrives – extraordinarily – behind the wheel of Blue Streak, his supercar “powered by a self-contained nuclear reactor… it was retrofitted into the exoskeletal structure of a machine that had earlier been used to bore tunnels under the ocean.” Lethem here interrupts the text with a page from a Jimmy Olsen comic showing a futuristic car. The project here is suddenly clear – The Arrest is like the novelisation of a comic, a book about the future that is actually an act of nostalgia for when that future and its technology appeared rosy and progressive.
The thing about the best Lethem novels – and I’m thinking back to early in his career, to Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude – is that they were such fun. I’ve read everything he’s written since and rarely has a novel approached the sheer pleasure of The Arrest. This is a dystopian novel in thrall to its own genre, full of knockabout comic book bravado, with regular knowing nods to literary and cinematic history. It is, in short, a blast.
• The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem is published by Atlantic Books (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
